Illustration for Harold Rosenberg's poem "A Bird for Every Bird." Later titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 1

THE LATTER HALF OF 1948 WAS A TUMULTUOUS TIME FOR MOTHERWELL; HE LATER REMEMBERED IT as one of the most miserable and stressful periods he had ever lived through. Although his work was being well received, and he was involved in a number of publishing projects and other professional activities (among them co-founding an art school called The Subjects of the Artist), in his personal life...

If he wasn’t exactly an “action painter” like Jackson Pollock, was Robert Motherwell a “mythmaker” in the sense of his other colleagues Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, all of whom reinvestigated archetypes and ancient motivations in their initial...